Finally Gunther straightened to his full height and shouted, “It’s all clean. Come one at a time.”

Zoe watched, terrified, as Seth picked his way through. Finally he turned around. “Why don’t you wait on that side, Zoe?”

“No way,” she said, with a bravery she didn’t feel.

Ridgeway’s fingertips tingled as he watched her begin picking her way through. To him, she looked like a ballerina dancing a lethal solo. The cave seemed to drop away from around him as he watched her step by agonizing step. She seemed to walk forever and not get any closer. Then she was there in his arms. He led her to the side while Father Morgen and George Stratton made their way across.

Finally they were all assembled.

“This is the main vault room,” Gunther said, looking first at the plan of the mine and then around him. “The plans show no booby traps here.” The chamber was perhaps seventy-five yards square and thirty or forty feet high. The floor was uneven, covered with dimly lit debris, looking like packing crates or irregular piles of rubbish.

“Yes, I know,” Father Morgen said dreamily. He looked about him, a sleepwalker suddenly awakened from his trance. “I was here,” he said, as if he didn’t entirely believe it. “I was here more than half a century ago… a lifetime ago.” He played his flashlight around the room, “We walked in… We walked in there.” His flashlight beam fixed on the entrance to a corridor on the other side of the chamber. “And the entrance to the vault is right over…” He swung the flashlight beam to the right “There.”

The metal vault door was set into an outcropping of gray rock. It was large, unrusted, and from the distance at which they stood, looked remarkably like the door to the Thule Gesellschaft Bank’s safe deposit box vault.

“There wouldn’t be booby traps here,” Morgen said, still in his dreamy tone of voice, “because there were men here, many of them. Walking about. The sergeant showed me. The main entrance was heavily guarded, and the rest of the approaches booby-trapped and mined to guard against people like us.”

Ridgeway led them toward the vault door. He had made it halfway across the chamber when he felt a section of the floor move slightly downward. From across the room came the metallic clacking and snicking of a mechanical apparatus.

“Hit the dirt!” Ridgeway yelled as he dived to the ground, pulling Zoe along with him. A single shot echoed in the room, followed by the dull clanking sound the dud ammunition had made in the other machine gun. Seth swore he heard the bullet parting the air above him.

Moments later, they all got to their feet and continued. As they approached the vault door, Seth shined his flashlight on one of the piles of debris scattered around the chamber. The piles were the skeletons of men dressed in the uniforms of the SS. There were a score of them scattered about the chamber. But with nerves burned and numbed by the horrors that had already played themselves out that day, neither Seth nor Zoe nor the others reacted to the bony hands and skulls sticking out of olive-drab uniforms.